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The Neuroscience of Cracking an Egg
There's a well-known story in the food studies world involving the acceptance, and eventual dominance, of pre-made cake mixes. In the 1950s, housewives were hesitant to buy cake mixes until General Mills started selling Betty Crocker mixes that required the cook to add fresh eggs as part of the preparation process. At that point, sales shot through the roof.
Blogger Harry Bringull at 90 Percent of Everything offer a pretty interesting explanation of why:
In the Betty Crocker example, the psychologists realized the customer wanted to play the role of a successful home-maker and cook. We could even go so far to argue that their customers may have felt societal pressures to perform this role well. The egg, therefore, becomes more than an ingredient, and more than just an extra pleasurable step. It becomes a prop, enabling the customer to play a social role.
Put differently, part of the pleasure of the cake didn't simply come from eating--it came from at least playing a (largely unnecessary) role in making the cake.
Now, according to Jonah Lehrer in a recent Wired post, there's some solid research showing why cracking an egg into a mix might be more emotionally rewarding than doing no work at all. In a mouse study:
Mice were trained to push levers to get one of two rewards. If they pressed lever A, they got a delicious drop of sugar water. If they pressed lever B, they got a different tasting drop of sugar water. (This reward was made with polycose, not sucrose.)
The scientists then started to play mind games with the mice, as they gradually increased the amount of effort required to get one of the sweet rewards. Although the mice only had to press the lever a single time to get the sugar water at the start of the experiment, by the end they were required to press the lever 15 times.
Here’s where things get interesting: When the test was over and the mice were allowed to relax in their home cage, they showed an overwhelming preference for whichever reward they’d worked harder to obtain. More lever presses led to tastier water.
Lehrer, smartly, concludes that, among other things, this suggests that if you're trying to lose weight, you should cook your own dinner. He also points out that we have an obesity epidemic not just because food is easy to prepare, but because pre-made food is less rewarding and forces us to compensate mentally.
Now, at some level, this is more or less what General Mills learned in 1952--that food (and just about everything else, I'd guess), is more rewarding when we put effort into it.
That said, a lot about how we eat has changed since 1952, and it's not because of a change in our brains. People have less time to cook; we have more money to spend out at restaurants; we have microwaves; the quality of pre-cooked food has increased dramatically. In other words, everything about the world around us is pushing us to make the sorts of choices about food that are fundamentally less emotionally rewarding.
Back in 1952, Betty Crocker portrayed the mixes that required cooks to add an egg as adding "home-made authenticity," and at the time, it worked great. But it's not clear to me that that would work as well today--people just aren't looking for foods that take more time to cook.
That said, I think this points to a dilemma I've highlighted before. We're gaining an increasingly clear understanding of how happy environmental and social stimuli make us, but in many instances, it turns out that we've designed a world that makes it difficult to make the happiest choices. And so it is with food. Cooking may be emotionally rewarding, but most Americans don't cook their own food every day. And regardless of what we learn from neuroscience, I find it easier to imagine that we'll be doing less, rather than more, cooking of our own food in the coming decade.